Concerns regarding Squeak design quality

Lex Spoon lex at cc.gatech.edu
Sun Jan 30 19:08:26 UTC 2005


Michael Latta <lattam at mac.com> wrote:
> What I guess I am questioning is whether the image has enough integrity 
> / quality of design to use in a production project.  If there are a lot 
> of unfinished stuff in the image, then our maintenance effort grows 
> with the amount of the existing code we try to use. 

The crushing argument that Squeak has enough XYZ to use for production
projects, is that people are successfully using Squeak in production
projects.  Given this reality, there must be *some* hole in any argument
along the lines of "Squeak does XYZ and thus can't be used in
production".  It's being used in production.  Notable examples are
SqueakSource and Swiki.  Swiki alone has 256,000 google hits.

So how can this be, given your concerns about code quality?  My answer:
because this code you are grousing about, actually works.  You have been
complaining about Balloon and getting it wrong.  Now you are saying
maybe Balloon works, but its design is bad.  Consider this: serious
engineers don't rewrite everything from scratch whenever they change a
design.  Serious engineers have to allocate their resources carefully,
and often it is a flat out mistake to spend time prettying up the code. 
If Morphic text processing reuses some of the text processing code from
MVC, then so what?  Isn't that good engineering?

If you want perfect pristine code, then there are plenty of toy
languages around you could play with, where people rewrite everything
from scratch all the time.  If you want something that is useful and
works, Squeak will be here waiting for you.

So there.

Lex



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